Islamizing Art: Archaeological Facts and Historiographical Fictions

Reconsidering the Formation of Islamic Visual Culture in Bilād al Shām in Honor of Oleg Grabar

Abstract

The Islamization of art has often been explained through theological prohibition, dynastic style, or narratives of civilizational rupture. Such approaches have illuminated important dimensions of Islamic aesthetics, yet they can obscure the material processes through which artistic practices actually changed across landscapes, monuments, workshops, and communities. This study reexamines the Islamization of art archaeologically and historiographically, with particular emphasis on Bilād al Shām and Transjordan. It distinguishes between materially observable transformations and later interpretive constructions concerning universal aniconism, abrupt rejection of pre-Islamic traditions, and the emergence of a monolithic Islamic style. Drawing on archaeological reports, architectural remains, decorative programs, inscriptions, spatial organization, and museum documentation, the study analyzes how inherited forms were reused, adapted, differentiated, and re signified within emerging Islamic political, religious, and social environments. Building on Oleg Grabar’s historically contextual approach, Islamization is conceptualized as a multidimensional process visible through transformations in patronage, spatial organization, epigraphic prominence, regimes of representation, adaptive reuse, and changing patterns of function. Evidence from the Amman Citadel, Qaṣr al Ḥallābāt, Quṣayr ʿAmrah, Qaṣr al Mshattā, Jarash, and Christian sites of Transjordan demonstrates substantial continuity with Late Antique, Byzantine, Sasanian, Classical, and regional traditions alongside the emergence of new Islamic priorities. The contextual coexistence of figural imagery in secular and courtly environments with increasingly text centered and non figural programs in sacred settings challenges assumptions of uniform Islamic aniconism. The study argues that Islamization was neither simple replacement nor passive continuity, but a negotiated process of selective adaptation, functional differentiation, political reorientation, and semantic transformation. Islamic visual culture emerged not as a single style imposed from above, but as a plural and historically situated field in which faith, authority, local craft, inherited forms, and intellectual practices interacted.